Georgia DOT praises stimulus, asks for more

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

As the year-old federal transportation stimulus winds down, Georgia Department of Transportation leaders on Tuesday praised its accomplishments and called for more.

“The message is pretty simple,” DOT Commissioner Vance Smith said at a news conference. “Transportation investment equals good jobs now and produces lasting assets for the future.” However, he added, “Even though with all the stimulus funds we have, we still have great needs in the state of Georgia.”

So far, the DOT is attributing the equivalent of 961 full-time jobs in the state to Georgia's $1.1 billion share of the transportation stimulus, and more will be employed as more projects get under way, said Meg Pirkle, who manages the stimulus program for the department. She said it may be a couple of years before all the stimulus projects are finished and the final work hours are counted.

Smith held the news conference to mark the release of a report by a national organization of transportation officials lauding the stimulus.

Georgia has named projects for all $932 million of roads money it received from the stimulus, and about $739 million worth of those projects have gone out to bid, Smith said. That will buy new and safer bridges, more than 1,000 miles of paving and even some of the expensive stuff: 17 road widening projects.

In addition, the state received more than $100 million for mass transit. MARTA got grants, including a stimulus grant swap with another agency that wound up saving MARTA from severe service cuts last year.

A national organization that advocates for transit, PIRG, released a report recently calculating that a stimulus dollar spent on mass transit saved almost twice as many jobs as a stimulus dollar spent on roads when taking into account the length of time those jobs lasted. Georgia leaders said federal rules dictated how much was spent on public transportation, and that both transit and roads were in need of funding. "I don’t think it’s an issue of competing one against the other," said Gerald Ross, the DOT's chief engineer.

MARTA was just one area where the stimulus masked serious shortfalls within state and local transportation budgets. Georgia’s own roads budget, reeling from accounting troubles and declining gas tax revenue, was so thin last year that in some months the DOT would not have been able to put a project out to bid if not for the stimulus.

Things have gotten a bit better, but they’re still rough. David Snell of the DOT contractor E.R. Snell said that since October 2008 his company had laid off 200 of 650 employees, and if new federal funds don’t come along, the coming year could be worse.

The stimulus has not won over everybody.

"I'm not impressed by the numbers," said Benita Dodd of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a Libertarian-leaning organization. "Who knows how much money would have been saved and how many jobs we would have created if we just let the private sector handle this on their own."

In Washington, Senate leaders last week called for a package of bills to create jobs that would include transportation funding. The details aren’t out yet, but President Barack Obama has backed a similar notion.

"I am confident, for example, that when one in 10 of our fellow citizens can't work, we should be able to come together and help business create more jobs," including credit help for small businesses, energy-efficiency tax breaks, and work on roads and bridges, Obama told reporters Tuesday after meeting with leaders in Congress, according to a White House transcript.  A White House spokesman, Adam Abrams, cited a report noting that the stimulus had created or saved more than 60,000 jobs in Georgia.

In the meantime, Congress has avoided taking up the major multiyear U.S. transportation funding bill that has expired. Instead, the federal government is funding transportation through extensions of the old law, which was widely viewed as inadequate for growing transportation needs.

States such as Georgia are getting nervous.

“We can continue to do with what we have to a certain time, and then at some point we have to have additional funding,” Smith said. He noted that he was also buoyed by Gov. Sonny Perdue's proposal for regional transportation funding referendums.

Georgia's transportation stimulus so far:

Total: $1.1 billion

Roads total: $932 million

Road projects bid: $739 million

Jobs so far (only part of projects under way): 961

Bridges to be replaced: 28

Planned road-widening projects: 17

Miles to be paved: 1,107

Transit vehicles to be purchased: 166

Source: Georgia Department of Transportation